Cataloguing the Empire”: The Regionary Catalogues
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- Cataloguing the Empire”: The Regionary Catalogues and the Role and Purpose of Bureaucratic Inventories By
- Contents: Introduction
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Conclusion
- Marble Plan and the Regionary Catalogues PP. 147- Bibliography: PP. 169-198
  
“Cataloguing the Empire”: The Regionary Catalogues and the Role and Purpose of Bureaucratic Inventories By: Simon Alistair Hosie A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy The University of Sheffield, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of History To all those who were involved with the making of this, Thank-you, I won’t forget this. Abstract: “Cataloguing the Empire”: The Regionary Catalogues and the Role and Purpose of Bureaucratic Catalogues The previous historiography of the Regionaries is extremely limited and provides few answers as to their origins or purpose. Whereas previous works have discarded documents like the Regionaries as unsuitable for administration, this thesis will provide a new potential production context for the Regionaries due to the Romans unique conception of administrative “usefulness”. Furthermore, with the methodology I have created, this thesis will challenge traditional historiographical notions of administrative “usefulness” as having been based on anachronistic modern values. To do this I will be exploring what the Regionary Catalogues can tell us about government of the city of Rome in Late Antiquity. Whereas previous study has focused on the practical data the Regionaries can provide about the urban administration. I propose that we should instead focus on how the Regionaries represent Roman conceptions of the administration. My methodology has therefore involved synthesising a new approach from Clifford Ando and Jon Lendon, whose work focused on the methods the imperial government used to represent itself to its subjects. Ando explored the complex representations of imperial authority, whilst Lendon investigated the culture of the aristocrats who governed. This allows us to explore how an aristocratic culture that emphasises tradition and glory amongst its semi-professional administrators, could construct a complex, socio-political hierarchy that would ensure a reasonable form of administrative effectiveness. To provide context for these explorations, I have examined a monumental document similar to the Regionaries. The Severan Marble Plan shares a number of similarities in content, including an author the Emperor Septimius Severus. When the factors behind the creation of the Marble Plan are considered and applied to the Regionary Catalogues we are able to provide a potential new origin for the Regionaries, the Emperor Aurelian and his urban reforms.
“Lists, lists, lists”, The Rome of the Regionary Catalogues PP. 1-23 Chapter One: “To you perceptive Reader, My History” The Implications of the Different Receptions of the Regionary Catalogues PP. 24-51 Sub-Chapter: The Manuscripts of the Regionary Catalogues PP. 31-44 Sub-Chapter: The Different Production Contexts of the Regionary Catalogues PP. 44-50
“A City of Bricks, Marble, and Ink” The Forma Urbis Romae and the Regionary Catalogues PP. 52-97 Sub-Chapter: Why we can’t use the Regionary Catalogues to locate “things”? PP. 57-64 Sub-Chapter: The Date and Purpose of the Marble Plan PP. 64-69 Sub-Chapter: A Comparison between the Regionary Catalogues and the Marble Plan PP. 69-76. Sub-Chapter: Who commissioned the Regionary Catalogues? PP. 76-79 Sub-Chapter: Aurelian’s Engagement with the City of Rome PP. 79-88 Sub-Chapter: “A Monumental Issue” Imperial Power, Culture, and Administrative Practice PP. 89-97
“Is Government not an art?” Roman Cartographical and Topographical Representations of the Administration PP. 98-132 Sub-Chapter: “A History without distinctions” Ando, Lendon and the Theory of Late Antique Roman Government PP. 103-111 Sub-Chapter: “An Elegant and Complicated Simplicity” The Notitia Dignitatum and the Laterculus Veronensis PP. 112-119 Sub-Chapter: “Who has got the biggest Obelisk?” Prestige, Perceptions and the Regionary Catalogues PP. 119-131
“Musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol” PP. 133-141 Appendix One: A Table of the Differences between the Curiosum and the Notitia PP. 142-146 Appendix Two: A Comparison between the Marble Plan and the Regionary Catalogues PP. 147- Bibliography: PP. 169-198 Primary Sources PP. 169-170 Secondary Sources: Books PP. 170-77 Secondary Sources: Articles PP. 178-198 Internet Sources P. 198
As a rhetorical device, compiling lists was (and still is) a forceful means of expressing the sheer weight of power and the complexity of a given individual or an organisation. From the tax lists of the Sumerians to the medieval catalogues of miracles, lists have lent themselves to both practical and literary uses. The Romans found list-making a laudable activity too and it soon became a popular literary device. The lists of fourth-century Rome, known as the Regionary Catalogues, are our most comprehensive source for the physical and administrative topography of Late Antique Rome. Organised according to the Augustan system of 14 administrative regions, they serve as a form of “architectural census”, listing the palaces of the Emperors, the houses of famous Senators, and the great Imperial structures such as the thermae of Diocletian and Caracalla, the Circus Maximus and the Flavian Amphitheatre.1 They could be a simple panegyric (a document, usually a poem, produced to lavish praise upon the history and culture of the city) to Rome’s history and magnificence, if not for their intermingling of monumental glorification with administrative facts and data. Seemingly mundane items such as the number of houses, flats, bakeries and cisterns are combined with the circumference of any given region, alongside incidental information for the monuments such as the height of Trajan’s columns or the number of seats in the Circus Maximus. Because of this it is a document that has been valued by historians across the ages as both an important administrative source and/or as a panegyric to “traditional” Rome. This has made their purpose a subject of considerable debate amongst historians, exacerbated by the fact that they are transmitted to us in two versions called the Notitia urbis Romae (written in 354 at the latest) and the Curiosum Urbis Romae Regionum XIIII (date unknown), with, ‘a history varied and interesting enough to furnish the plot for a novel of adventure.’2 Both documents are considered incomplete due to the discrepancies present in both. Certain items appear in only one manuscript tradition, whilst certain statistical information appears highly fanciful (the Circus Maximus has a seating capacity of 480,000, the modern world’s largest sporting venue, the Indianapolis Speedway seats 257,325). Often it has been hard for modern historians to distinguish between the different possible uses of the lists. This confusion has led to the Regionary Catalogues being, alternately and exclusively, treated as either an administrative document produced by Rome’s urban administration or as a panegyric. This confusion is, in part, due to the fact that there is only one text comparable to the Regionaries. This is the Notitia of Constantinople, more properly known as the Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae. Similar to the Regionary Catalogues, the Notitia of Constantinople identifies more human and physical resources, buildings and institution of the city than any other single source and is transmitted alongside the Regionary Catalogues with other texts that are administrative and/or technical in nature. Information contained within the text and dedicatory preface, such as the number of domus and vicomagistri, suggests that the Notitia of Constantinople, just like the Regionaries, is drawn from or connected to the officium of the praefectus urbis.3 And, like Regionaries, rather than being critically examined in its own right, the Notitia of Constantinople has more often been referred to in passing for the information it provides or the topography it can illustrate. However there are difficulties utilising the Notitia of Constantinople as a comparative context for the Regionary Catalogues. A particular point of textual difference is that the Notitia of Constantinople also depicts a firmly Christian city and contains multiple Churches and no pagan temples of shrines, in contrast to the Regionaries’ abundance of shrines and pagan ritual sites but no Christian Churches. And whilst it would be going too far to say that the figures of the Notitia of Constantinople are completely reliable (the numbers of domus cause similar problems to the Regionaries number of domus and insulae), they are more consistent and verifiable than the apparently erratic and inconsistent numbers in the Regionaries.4 The combination of the dedicatory preface, which provides us of a firm dating to the reign of Theodosius II, and the topographical introduction to each region means it is possible to make a relatively accurate survey of the Regio of Constantinople.5 The length of the city given in the text is a remarkably accurate, based on an east-to-west measurement from the Porta Aurea in the south-west to the far-eastern end of the promontory, 14,075 Roman feet.6 We also know significantly more about the author of the Notitia of Constantinople in contrast to our complete absence of information of the Regionaries thanks to its dedicatory preface. The dossier of texts that the Notitia of Constantinople appears in (known as the Speyer Codex) contain a front piece illustration for a parallel text relating to the city of Rome but the text itself is lost, whilst the Notitia version of the Regionary Catalogues are also contained within the Codex.7 This would at least suggest that the creator/s of the codex considered the Regionary Catalogues an independent text, whilst the Notitia of Constantinople was meant to be paired with and matched to something more comparable. In the absence of an appropriate comparative context, to address the confusion surrounding the Regionaries we must recognise that the issues facing any study of the Regionary Catalogues are intimately tied to the immense cultural and political changes that faced the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries. My thesis shall, through a new interpretation of the Regionary Catalogues, address the often anachronistic approach to the Roman manner of urban administration. My hypothesis is that by attempting to strip away the document’s layers and accretions we can attempt to see how the chaos of the third century informed the Regionaries’ initial creation. We will then be able to demonstrate how the Roman concept of administrative usefulness was one that was informed by and entwined with the culture of the aristocratic administrators who governed Rome. In this introduction I will first provide a brief overview of the historiography of the administration of the later Roman Empire and how this has informed the study of the Regionary Catalogues. I will then demonstrate how I have used this information to create a new approach towards the Regionaries, and then outline how I intend to use this approach to structure the thesis. ***** The historiography of the Regionary Catalogues has to some extent mirrored larger historiographical shifts in the area of late Roman history, moving away from administrative to social and cultural history, so it is worth examining these larger trends first before turning to the Regionary Catalogues. For a long time the traditional historiographical view of the administration of the Later Roman Empire, based upon the work of Edward Gibbon and Michael Rostovtzeff, was that of a highly bureaucratised administration.8 This was based in part on the large amount of legal evidence for the annonae (the public ration) created as a result of its extension by the new autocratic government of Diocletian’s Tetrarchy (AD 293-305).9 This “Dominate” was interpreted as a deliberate contrast, particularly at the local level, to the supposedly amateurish government of the earlier Roman Empire often known as the “Principate”, which was characterised by its lack of modern bureaucratic structures of professionalism.10 This was the school of thought that Sinnigen, Chastagnol and Jones, the historians who have laid the foundations of the administrative history of late antique Rome, were trained in. However, the work of all three was characterised by a much more nuanced approach than previous works to the changes that the administration faced in the third and fourth centuries. Their work has been characterised by a focus on the primary sources, particularly the law codes of which we have so many in this period. All three agreed upon the growing trend towards the centralisation and professionalisation of the Empire’s administration, but, when all three authors examined Rome, they found that its administration had far more in common with the government of Augustus Caesar (27 BC to AD 14) than the rest of the fourth-century administration. William Sinnigen’s work focused on the staff of the administrative bureaus and how these functioned on a day-to-day basis. In his monograph on The Officium of the Urban Prefecture during the Later Roman Empire, Sinnigen first argued that, whilst the Urban Prefect of Rome had an extensive personal staff similar to other administrators, this had been based upon the “make-do and mend” attitude of the Roman administrators rather than the wider increase in the imperial bureaucracy.11 André Chastagnol’s work possessed a more traditional focus, concentrating on examining the senior political figures of the Empire and what their administrative role was. In his work La Préfecture urbaine à Rome sous le Bas-Empire, which now forms the basis for modern historiography of Rome’s urban administration, he argued that the essential administrative structures remained unchanged from the post’s inception under Augustus until Constantine’s reforms (AD 326-337) that centralised power under the Urban Prefect.12 Chastagnol’s work demonstrated that the Urban Prefecture evolved in a remarkably Roman fashion (which will be explored further in this thesis). This occurred through the acquisition of a multiple different jurisdictions as a result of the auctoritas of the office (which were then retroactively recognised), in contrast to acquiring the jurisdiction through formal appointment.13 Early Urban Prefects had a remarkably limited jurisdiction, restricted to law enforcement during the day, and therefore had to work closely with senior figures like the Prefect of the Vigiles and the Prefect of the Annonae in order to effectively govern. They had to also co-operate with the numerous vicomagistri, quaestors, praetors, Curatores who managed the various regions of Rome under the Augustan administrative arrangements.14 However the Urban Prefecture began to rapidly acquire prestige and soon became the most prestigious office of the Senatorial cursus honorum. Certain office holders were particularly spectacular in the enactment of their duties; Vespasian’s brother Flavius Sabinus was noted for preparing the way for Vespasian’s victory, whilst Pertinax and Pupienus Maximus both becoming Emperors not long after they were Urban Prefects. They therefore leant the office a certain glow, which consequently increased the office’s auctoritas.15 Over the second century, the Urban Prefect was therefore able to acquire a substantial increase in jurisdiction. By the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Urban Prefect acted as the chief judge in criminal cases with a jurisdiction of 100 miles around Rome. Septimius Severus outlined further increases to the Urban Prefect’s administrative and legal jurisdiction. The Urban Prefecture was now expected to oversee all criminal trials and investigations within 100 miles and to that end the Prefect could now ban individuals, trades and professions from the city in the interests of public order. For the first time he had also acquired the responsibility to oversee that meat was sold at a fair price.16 To ensure the Prefect was capable of performing his duties, a rare alteration to the administrative fabric occurred and he was granted a formal Officium compromised of soldiers from the Urban Cohorts.17 Perhaps the most significant change that occurred in the Urban Prefecture was his appointment as the Emperor’s personal representative in the fourth century. However this was simply recognition of the fact that by this point the Urban Prefect had more or less acquired control of all of Rome’s major administrative services.18 Whilst there were changes in the formal competencies of the Urban Prefect, this was not the result of specific administrative reforms, rather it came about because the impressive honours of the Urban Prefect combined with the formidable patronage networks of the senators who achieved the post the meant that the Urban Prefect was able to affect areas well beyond his official competency. It is for this reason that Chastagnol emphasised the importance of the Urban Prefect’s family ties and personal authority to the effectiveness of his administration.19 A.H.M Jones has been, perhaps, the greatest and most comprehensive historian of the government of the Later Roman Empire. His magnum opus, The Later Roman Empire 284-602 (1986), is the definitive administrative history of late antique Rome’s administration. In contrast to Chastagnol, Jones attempted to characterise how the whole imperial administration functioned in practical terms and situated his analysis of the Urban Prefect within this greater framework. Like Chastagnol, he found that there was a great deal of continuity in the practices of the administration from the 1st century to the 4th, even though the desired goals and outcomes of the administration were substantially different.20 In particular, he refused to take a chronological approach to his work as he felt that many elements of the field remained largely the same, instead focusing on the few changes that did occur.21 In particular, Jones noted that even into the late fourth century the Urban Prefect’s authority over his staff remained ill-defined and often subject to numerous appeals to the emperor. Jones attempted to explain all of this as a result of Rome becoming an administrative anachronism in comparison to the rest of the Empire.22 For Jones, burdened by political traditions and a senatorial nobility obsessed with its past, Rome’s greatest administrative challenge was the sheer force of inertia that resulted from the City’s history.23 Subsequent historiography has shifted the focus away from the forms of government and how they worked, and instead asked the questions of who it affected and how. As it had been shown by Chastagnol and Jones that the so called “Dominate” had a great deal of similarity with the previous style of administration, later works contained a much greater emphasis on the continuity of the administration rather than abrupt changes. David Potter’s work focused on how the Empire managed the multitude of crises between the second and third centuries. He argues that the astonishing continuity in face of the many upheavals of the third century demonstrated the strength of the Roman imperial system. The increasingly militarised state was a result of the emperors attempting to replace the “traditional” methods of ensuring the compliance of its citizens which had broken down in the third century.24 As part of this redefinition of imperial power, Peter Brown has suggested that the emperors promoted new ideologies to ensure loyalty to the central government.25 Clifford Ando’s and Jon Lendon’s work on imperial ideologies (to which I shall turn in a moment) built upon this. Their studies focused upon how the imperial administration managed to achieve compliance with its wishes across such a wide and varied empire.26 In contrast to the histories of Chastagnol and Jones, these new approaches towards the administration concentrated on a much wider variety of evidence, including using epigraphic and numismatic evidence to explore the visual aspects of the Roman administration as well as the traditional literary evidence. However, they have tended to divert the perspective from a history of the Roman administration and, instead, re-orientated it to focus on the culture and society of those elites who ran the empire. Building upon this the recent historiography of late antique Rome, whilst accepting the work and conclusions of Chastagnol and Jones, has moved away from studying the administration of the city, to a study of the cultural and social changes that occurred in the later Empire.27 Elements of the administration such as the food and water supply of Rome or the transformation of the Senate continue to be studied, only now for the social implications of those administrative policies.28 Tellingly, a recent volume on late antique Rome, Lucy Grig’s and Gavin Kelly’s Two Romes (2012) does not have a chapter focused on the administration of the cities of Rome and Constantinople. Instead the discussions of administrative aspects are interwoven with the volume’s attention to urban life. The interest is now in what people thought and felt. Documents that had been treated by Chastagnol and Jones as records of government are now examined as cultural documents, insights into a literary tradition that valued official looking documents and catalogues.29 These historians felt that the numbers and information within our sources are often prone to exaggeration and poor transmission so that they can hardly be reliable sources for the administration. It has become more widespread to instead, examine them for what they can tell us about the society and what it considered culturally significant.30 Download 0.8 Mb. Share with your friends:
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